The pontiff commemorated African migrants who’ve tragically drowned while seeking new lives in Europe and urged elected leaders everywhere to act and pass “legal and safe pathways”
Pope Leo XIV’s week-long visit to Spain included an urgent appeal for the recognition of the rights, dignity, and humanity of migrants, calling on the world to recognize vulnerable people forced to flee their homelands as more than just “a mere category or a statistic.”
“Dear migrants, before saying anything else to you, I want to bow before your dignity,” Pope Leo said from the Canary Islands, the final destination of one of the deadliest routes for African migrants seeking new lives in Europe. “You are not just numbers or files. You are people who have left behind families and homes. You have dreams that no one has the right to despise.”
“Human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border,” he added.
Pope Leo’s visit to the island included a visit to a migrant center that provides emergency humanitarian aid to arriving individuals. Since opening five years ago, it has assisted 70,000 migrants, Jesuit magazine America reported. The organization currently shelters around 700 individuals, mostly from West Africa. “Here at Las Raíces, as in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Leo listened to testimonies from migrants,” the report said.
One letter read to the pontiff during the trip – which included an address to the Spanish parliament emphasising respect for the dignity of migrants and other vulnerable individuals – was written by a survivor who “described being trafficked from Africa to Europe by a mafia-organized crime group, who told her she owed an equivalent of $28,000 upon arrival,” OSV News reported.
The woman, identified as “Blessing,” was kept captive in dehumanizing conditions for months “with barely any food, unable to bathe for weeks, living in conditions I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” she wrote. “And when the time came to cross the sea, I saw how the people who left before us that same day drowned.” Blessing said that she ultimately became pregnant as a result of sexual abuse by one of her traffickers and gave birth to a child that was immediately taken from her. She would not be reunited with her child until nearly a year later, when authorities arrested her abuser.
Pope Leo reserved some of his most poignant words for her and other migrants who’ve survived similarly horrific ordeals while fleeing their homelands.
“Dear Blessing, although you are not here today, your voice is,” Leo said, adding that he hoped his message to her – that her horrific ordeal does not define her – reached her and other survivors of human trafficking. “Your life does not belong to those who harmed you; your body does not belong to those who took advantage of you; your days do not belong to those who wanted to chain you to fear.”
Her dignity belongs to her and cannot be taken away, he continued. “We want to walk with you until that truth feels stronger than the pain.”
Pope Leo stated that government leaders have a moral duty to act on “legal and safe pathways,” “serious processes of reception and integration,” and “effective protection for victims” like Blessing. “Even today, monsters lurk in these seas: mafias that profit from despair, traffickers who enslave women and children, and those whose indifference allows the poor to be swallowed up by exploitation or forgetfulness.”
“While the Canaries, eight islands roughly 60 miles from the African coast, may be considered a vacation spot for wealthy Europeans,” Religion News Service reported, “the reality on the ground tells a deadlier tale, where tens of thousands of migrants arrive each year stranded on its rocky shores and thousands more die in its surrounding waters.”
According to the Caminando Fronteras, more than 3,000 migrants died trying to reach the Canary Islands in 2025. “More than 10,000 people were recorded to have drowned along this dangerous migration route in 2024, it added,” said the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The Missing Migrants Project, an initiative of the International Organization for Migration, estimates that nearly 35,000 migrants have gone missing while attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea from northern Africa and Turkey into Europe.
During the Canary Islands visit, Pope Leo followed the example set by his predecessor and cast a wreath into the waters off the islands in memory of the missing and dead.
“The Successor of Peter cannot ignore these docks,” he said. “The Church cannot ignore these waters or any place where hunger, thirst, violence, fear or exile continue to wound human dignity.” During a large public service during the tour, Leo urged the faithful to pray “for our brothers and sisters who have lost their lives at sea.”
“In the first-ever papal address to Spanish lawmakers, the American pope said a ‘moral renewal’ was necessary in legislatures and public life to ensure respect for the inherent dignity of all people, including migrants,” PBS News reports. Spain “has bucked a trend in Europe and the United States” by passing legislation legalizing its undocumented population, the report said.
Reuters reports that the Spanish government, which has touted the economic benefits of legalization, has already received double the expected applications from migrants eagerly hoping to be better integrated into their new communities.
Here in the United States, Dreamers and other immigrant communities continue to push for similar legislation that would finally grant families long overdue relief. Pope Leo has also condemned the federal government’s mistreatment of undocumented communities, saying that “when people have lived good lives—many of them for 10, 15, 20 years—treating them in a way that is, to say the least, extremely disrespectful, and with instances of violence, is troubling.”
Earlier this year, Leo also selected a formerly undocumented immigrant to lead West Virginia Catholics. Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, who served as an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of Washington D.C. since 2023, is a Central American immigrant who fled for his life hidden in the trunk of a car. Menjivar-Ayala has supported Leo’s humane vision by asserting fierce support for immigrant communities as Washington’s auxiliary bishop, including penning an April 2025 National Catholic Reporter op-ed that rebuked the federal government’s mass deportation agenda and urged faithful to not be complicit in the targeting of their neighbors.
“To those of you who are silent or think this does not involve you, to those of you who are not troubled by this — or worse, who applaud it — particularly those who are Catholic, I ask you: Do you not see the suffering of your neighbors?” he wrote.
Menjivar-Ayala also issued a call to federal officers urging them to “reclaim your conscience. What you are doing is worth nothing if it is stained with unjust cruelty,” he continued. “That is not what America stands for. You too can and should speak out against this terror and infliction of suffering on people. You can refuse to be involved in oppression and these grievous assaults on human rights and dignity.”
